Most passive verbs in English

According to Michael Rundell and Adam Kilgarriff, there are only 23 verbs in English that are passive more than half the time.

Figure 4: The ‘most passive’ verbs in the BNC, for which a ‘usually passive’ label might be proposed.

Percentile	Ratio	Lemma	Frequency
0.2	72.2	station	557
0.2	71.8	base	19201
0.3	71.1	destine	771
0.3	68.7	doom	520
0.4	66.3	poise	640
0.4	65.0	situate	2025
0.5	64.7	schedule	1602
0.5	64.1	associate	8094
0.6	63.2	embed	688
0.7	62.0	entitle	2669
0.8	59.8	couple	1421
0.9	58.1	jail	960
1.1	57.8	deem	1626
1.1	55.5	confine	2663
1.2	55.4	arm	1195
1.2	54.9	design	11662
1.3	53.9	convict	1298
1.5	53.1	clothe	749
1.5	52.8	dedicate	1291
1.5	52.4	compose	2391
1.6	51.5	flank	551
1.7	50.8	gear	733
1.9	50.1	levy	603

Multiple of the people

In his post on numerous, yesterday, Geoff Pullum noted that philosopher James Dreier had sent him some examples of multiple as a determinative but didn't provide any examples. I couldn't find any in the COCA or BNC, but here are some from the web:

• about a certain item, a book, that very likely implies that multiple of the people who visit your site are all set to make a purchase.
• Right, except in the videos, multiple of the people putting them up are actually doing the objective
• Multiple of the people I met were also in love with the spirituality in India, while others were enamored with the Architecture in India.
• ...recommended it include multiple of the people responsible for the Solaris Certification exams.
• Multiple of the people have considered this acne skin care step as one of the most essential acne skin care pointers
• The food is amazing, this is largely in part to the fact that multiple of the people crashing at the house are fabulous cooks
• We were certainly approached and had discussions with multiple of the people who were awarded money, about whether or not we wanted to lock ...
• You can also select multiple of the same object.
• We analyzed a panel of viruses derived from HIV-1 NL43, which carry point mutations at single or multiple of the cleavage sites in Gag [24], [27], ...

As you can see in the last example, we also have a hint that single might head down that same path.

English too easy

“It is fortunate if the first foreign language learned is not English. The initial, very quick and spectacular successes of English learning may evoke the false image in students that learning any foreign language is that simple,” reads a draft bill obtained by news website Origo.hu that would amend Hungary’s education laws.

More here.

The Hungarian students I've taught didn't exhibit this problem, but then again, I haven't taught many Hungarians, so perhaps it's a selection problem. Or not.

Numerous as a determinative

Rodney Huddleston sends an interesting example from yesterday's Australian:

Many countries treat illegal immigrants and asylum-seekers far more harshly than Australia, and numerous impose mandatory detention, a provision explicitly provided for in the refugee convention.

Dictionaries treat numerous as an adjective, and I think that's right. The Australian is using it as a determinative such as many, which doesn't strike me as grammatical, and I can't find any similar examples. I do, however, find these, in which numerous is being used in the partitive construction, which typically requires a determinative.

1. 2000 ACAD Monist: later additions to the first published versions of the preponderance of the earlier essays. Numerous of the former do advocate a discipline, the cultivation of a form of ability
2. 1996 NEWS CSMonitor: Japan, Scotland, Australia, and Kenya. # LOS ANGELES # As numerous of the more thoughtful teens interviewed observed, a lot of L.A. slang comes from

They don't really work for me either though.

The categorization of `close'

Here I am back trying to place a word in the right box, or boxes as it may be. I'm not really sure why I find this kind of work so engaging, but I suppose there's no accounting for taste.

My most recent target has been close. Of course, there is the verb as in close the door, and the noun meaning `the end' (e.g., the close of the day); these are clear cut. But then there are examples like these:

1. Closer to the end, I'll come and get you.
2. The bank is close to the store.
3. I walk to my university because it is very close by.
4. Put it close to the door.
5. She followed very close behind the taxi.

Traditionally, these would be classified as adjectives, and that would be that. But if you accept the idea of intransitive prepositions (those that don't require objects), as set out in the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, and put forward by Jespersen (1924) and Jackendoff (1973), among others, then number 1, in particular might pique your curiosity.

FANBO

Further to my previous post, it turns out that the 1932 printing of Advanced English Syntax by C.T. Onions has the same passage, but the list of "conjunctions" does NOT include yet or only. The new edition that I have is a 1985 printing, but the copyright date is 1971, which is after the 1951 mention found by Karl Hagan.

Thanks to Geoff Pullum for tracking this down!

The annals of FANBOYS

For some time, I've been on the trail of the origin of the FANBOYS mnemonic for what traditional grammar calls "coordinating conjunctions". I recently got a copy of C.T. Onions's 1971 Modern English Syntax: New edition of An Advanced English Syntax prepared from the author's materials by B.D.H. Miller.

Section 23, (p. 14) says,

"Two or more sentences, clauses, phrases, or single words, linked together by one of the conjunctions

and, but, or, nor, for, yet, only

are called co-ordinate, i.e. of the same rank; and the conjunctions which link them together are called co-ordinating conjunctions."

This is FANBOY with an extra o for only, FANBOYO, if you will.

What I'm wondering is whether this is the same as Onions's original list in the 1904 edition of An Advanced English Syntax. Might any of you have access to this?

By the way, unlike many later authors, Onions [thanks to Ian Carmichael for the link] does notice that, "in modern English prose, for (unlike the other co-ordinating conjunctions) can link together sentences only."

[See the update]

Languages Canada Members Grant 150 Scholarships to Japanese Youth Affected by Earthquake

PRESS RELEASE: LANGUAGES CANADA, JULY 21, 2011

Languages Canada Members Grant 150 Scholarships to Japanese Youth Affected by Earthquake 

Languages Canada members are awarding over $430,000 in scholarships to support Japanese youth who were affected by the Tohoku earthquake in March, 2011. So far, 32 accredited language schools have offered 150 scholarships to Japanese students over the next year.

The “Hope for Youth – Study in Canada Project” is a joint program between the Embassy of Canada, Languages Canada and Samantha Thavasa Japan Ltd. The scholarships will cover course tuition and, in most cases, accommodations. Insurance for all the participants will be provided free of charge by Guard.me Health Insurance, an associate member of Languages Canada.

“Canada and Japan have a long-standing relationship in education, and our members experience every day through their interaction with Japanese students the friendship that our countries have forged,” explains Gonzalo Peralta, Executive Director at Languages Canada. “This initiative, proposed by our members, is the best way to let Japanese students know we are here for them.”

Round-trip tickets will be offered free of charge by Air Canada and Samantha Thavasa Japan Ltd for departure dates starting October 10, 2011. The list of participating institutions will be posted on the Embassy of Canada website.

Applicants must be Japanese citizens between the ages of 15 and 30 who were affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake. This includes students who lost family, homes and jobs, or were evacuated due to the nuclear accident in Fukushima.

The following Languages Canada Members have graciously offered scholarships for the Hope for Youth – Study in Canada Project:

• Apex Language and Career College
• Canadian College of English Language
• CLLC Canadian Language Learning College
• Columbia College
• East Coast School of Languages
• Eurocentres Canada
• Global Village English Centre – Calgary
• Global Village English Centre – Vancouver
• Global Village English Centre Victoria
• ILAC (International Language Academy of Canada)
• ILSC (International Language Schools of Canada)
• Interlangues Language School
• Lethbridge College
• LSC Language Studies Canada
• Maple Leaf Academy
• North Island College
• Pan Pacific College
• PLI Pacific Language Institute
• Quest Language Studies
• Saint John College, University of New Brunswick, Saint John
• Saint Mary’s University – TESL Centre
• St Giles International
• Stewart College of Languages
• Study Abroad Canada
• Tamwood International College
• University of Alberta English Language Program
• University of Windsor
• Guard.me (Health Insurance for all participants)

http://www.canadainternational.gc.ca/japan-japon/

Some questions about teaching

These may sound like naive questions, but they are genuine:

1. Is it important to teach in such a way that the content of what you teach is internally consistent? In other words, does it matter if one part of what you teach contradicts other parts? For example, does it matter that many English language teachers tell their students that linking verbs are stative verbs?
2. Is it important to teach in such a way that the content of what you teach is consistent with available evidence?
3. Is it important to teach in such a way that the content of what you teach is consistent with the truth, irrespective of the available evidence?
4. Do the answers to these questions depend on what you teach?  In particular, would teaching an exceedingly complex system, such as a natural language, lead to different answers than teaching a less complex system, such as a programming language?
5. Finally, why did you answer the way you did?

Rearing heads

Ever noticed that when a head is reared, it's almost certain to be ugly? Ever wonder what other kinds of heads rear up? The COCA turns up the following:

prickly, wobbly, unpretty, troublesome, sultry, scaly, ready, pontificating, polychromatic, one-eyed, monstrous, invisible, interesting, impenetrable, evil, ever-changing, emaciated, contemptible, bearish, bearded, abusive, enormous

Some, like unpretty, are boring, but I quite like the image of something rearing its wobbly head.

Just in case you had wondered.

Trees and diagrams

I've had reason to draw some Reed-Kellogg diagrams lately. If you've never heard of these, you can learn straight from the original source, thanks to the magic of Google books. Click on the following to get more:

Cambridge Journals Temporarily Free

Cambridge Journals are free for the next six weeks, no registration necessary. If you don't have access through an institution or subscription, this is a great time to catch up on some articles about language and linguistics. In particular, you might want to check out:

Clear as a preposition?

Consider clear in the following sentences. Is it most like an adjective, an adverb, or a preposition?

• Soon we were clear of the town.
• *Soon we became clear of the town. 
• *Soon we were more clear of the town.
• We stayed clear of the town.
• Just clear of the town I find men at work in an excavation in the sand.
• There was a house just clear of the town. 
• A two hour walk would put them well clear of the town.

Roger Ebert confuses ESL materials for native speaker materials

In Roger Ebert's blog at the Chicago Sun-Times, he's completely trashed the Macmillan Readers version of The Great Gatsby (Retold by Margaret Tarner). He can't believe that this is for typical American high school students. In fact, it isn't. The book clearly says in the front matter that it's "for learners of English," but Ebert seems to have missed that part.

Studies about international English proficiency

This appeared a few months ago in the `Johnson' blog at The Economist, but I only stumbled across it recently. It seems that a company called EF Education First, which teaches English along with other subjects, has published a large-scale international study of English language proficiency around the world. `Johnson' sums up the study and findings well:

The history of English in ten minutes

A witty series of shorts from the Open University:

Amirite?

Tag questions were the topic of a recent edition of "The word" in the Boston Globe, a column shared by Jan Freeman and Erin McKean, now of Wordnik. Writes McKean,

Some days it seems that the most common kind of understanding is misunderstanding: Every conversation — not to mention each e-mail, IM, or text message — is rife with opportunities for crossed circuits and hurt feelings. There’s no end of advice about how to avoid miscommunication: Keep things simple. Take your time. Be aware of cultural differences. But missing from all these communication-helper lists is a little linguistic tic that most people use every day: the tag question.

You know what tag questions are, don’t you? Tag questions are those little questioning upticks, usually found at the end of a sentence — like that don’t you? — that grease the conversational wheels.

Status

Today, English, Jack hit one of those meaningless and yet somehow notable milestones: 100,000 unique visits. I often wonder who these people are and how many of them really intended to end up reading about English, but I hope we've interested, entertained, and instructed a few of them. We've been at it since July of 2006, about a month short of five years. This is post #475. And according to Alexa, there are about four million blogs that are more popular than this one.

Just in case you were wondering...

In spite of a lot of evidence

Some grammar books will tell you that a lot of is a determiner (e.g., The Grammar Book, p. 330). The problem is that these books haven't decided what they mean when they say something is a determiner. They haven't made a clear distinction between the category (e.g., noun, adjective, preposition, etc.), which I'll call determinative, and the function (subject, object, modifier, etc.), which I'll call specifier, and they tend to shift back and forth between them unwittingly.

Errors and noticing

Yesterday I spent a good deal of time trying to figure out the constraints around the type of relative construction in the following sentences:

1. This is the town that I grew up in.
2. That's the room that we're going to use.
3. This is the town where I grew up.
4. That's the room where we're going to have the party.

It may seem obvious at first, but it's very difficult to describe a rule that covers all situations. But that's not what I set out to write about today. The point is that in trying to figure it out, I was reading and rereading the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, struggling to get all the relevant information to gather together in one part of my brain and make sense together.

Ben Zimmer at the Boston Globe

At the Boston Globe, `The Word' is usually written by Jan Freeman, but she's recently been sharing duties with Erin McKeen, former dictionary editor. Now Ben Zimmer, late of the NYT Magazine's `On Language' column seems to have joined the team. He's got a nice piece in Sunday's paper (yes, I know it's not Sunday yet, but that's the date on the article) about dictionary definitions. Check it out.

NSA style guide

In case you're a style guide aficionado, you might want to know that BoingBoing has just released a PDF of the US National Security Agency's style guide which was acquired under a freedom of information request. It includes such models of clear style as:

The last and the most important word

How are we to analyze the two instances of the in the title? On p. 395, the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language deals with the and the superlatives. It takes the in examples like this point is [the most important] as being a determinative functioning as a modifier. It differentiates this from examples like this is [the most important point], where it is a determinative functioning as a determiner (aka specifier) in the noun phrase. But what happens when you coordinate superlatives as in the title? Which the is the specifier?

Presumably, it would be the first one, since the specifier would precede any modifiers. But why does the second superlative require the modifier while the first doesn't?

Being selling

A while ago - in fact, a few years ago - I saw this and wondered, 'Being selling? - hmm':



It occurred to me that this 'being' might be a typo for 'begins'. Still, I thought 'being selling' made sense to me (if not appropriate in the given context).

When I saw the headline "Touro College accused of being selling grades and degrees", I was more confident that this was an instance of nonfinite progressive BE. But then, when I follow the link to the original article, the interesting construction is nowhere to be found.

I don't know about you, but I happen to think that being doing something, as opposed to doing something, is a wonderful stretch of the English verbal system. Why don't people do this more often?

Over three decades ago, Halliday spoke of this as a gap to be filled (in 'On Being Teaching', which you can see cited here). My question is, is the gap being filled now? Or would I be accused of being filling the gap too forcefully?

Per + bare NP

I just noticed two things about the preposition per. It is usually followed by a bare singular noun phrase (i.e., one with no determiner aka specifier). This is odd because singular NPs almost always require a specifier unless the head noun is a proper noun. We say, take one pill per day, not *take one pill per a day or *per days.

But even more interesting is that sometimes it is followed by plural noun phrases, almost always specified by 100, 1,000, 100,00, etc. (e.g., The abortion rate had dropped from nearly 30 per 1,000 women of childbearing age, to less than 2.) And then when we speak this, we typically say per thousand women, instead of per one thousand women. So is thousand functioning as a specifier in thousand women?

By the way, you do find examples like a 0.75 ERA and an average of 15 strikeouts per seven innings, but these are rare.

Repeated discussions

Another activity post:

Many years ago, Paul Nation, one of the nicest people in language teaching, though now retired, introduced me to the idea of the repeated discussion, or what he calls the 4-3-2 speaking activity. You can see him describe it beginning at about 7:30 in this video:

Words as a measure of hope

Here's the talk I gave today at TEDxHumber as scripted. (Of course I deviated in the actual talk, which I'll link to when it goes online).
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[Update: the video is here]

TEDxHumber talk

I'll be giving a TED talk at the independent TED event being organized by a bunch of Humber folks. My topic is "Words as a measure of hope". Details follow:

Engineering interaction

Here's a quick idea:

Sometimes my students are more focussed on their textbooks and handouts than on interacting with each other. Let's say we're working on something like this:

Proved/proven

There seems to be a lot of uncertainty about the past participle of prove. I regularly notice the NY Times waffling between has proven and has proved, sometimes even from one paragraph to the next, as in this article:

Ryan’s medical update on Sanchez seemed to carry an underlying message. Sanchez has proved to be a much better quarterback this season than he was as a rookie, when Ryan made a point of not relying on Sanchez to win games on his own, especially in the playoffs.

Now that Sanchez has proven he is more capable of playing his position."

Some teaching activities

Though I conceived English, Jack as "second thoughts on English and how she's taught," it seems I do a lot more thinking and writing about English than I do about how it's taught. I'm not really sure why that is, but the bias is quite obvious to anyone who reads a few posts. Anyhow, recently a number of ideas have come together and I've tweaked a few activities that I use, so I plan to explain a few of them over the next few days.

One almost-universal characteristic of reading or listening texts is that they come with a set of comprehension questions. This presentation suggest two obvious options: do them for homework and take them up in class or spend some quiet time in class answering them and then take them up in class.

The exact opposite

"It's all a matter of keeping my eyes open. Nature is like one of those line drawings of a tree that are puzzles for children: Can you find hidden in the leaves a duck, a house, a boy, a bucket, a zebra, and a boot? Specialists can find the most incredibly well-hidden things. A book I read when I was young recommended an easy way to find caterpillars to rear: you simply find some fresh caterpillar droppings, look up, and there's your caterpillar. More recently an author advised me to set my mind at ease about those piles of cut stems on the ground in grassy fields. Field mice make them; they cut the grass down by degrees to reach the seeds at the head... Meanwhile the mouse is positively littering the field with its little piles of cut stems into which, presumably, the author of the book is constantly stumbling.

"If I can't see these minutiae, I still try to keep my eyes open. I'm always on the lookout for antlion traps in sandy soil, monarch pupae near milkweed, skipper larvae in locust leaves. These things are utterly common, and I've not seen one."

-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Well, today I saw one. It was in an essay by So Hyun Park, one of my students. She wrote, "soon I faced the exactly same situation as Barry Schwartz."

"Of course that's what she wrote!" I thought. "Why wouldn't she?" Adverbs modify adjectives, and same is an adjective, so you would naturally expect *the exactly same. The correct form, though, is the exact opposite.

Google Books Corpus with BYU interface

Mark Davies has now provided a new way to search the Google Books corpus. That would be the 155 BILLION word Google Books Corpus. His interface allows you to search not just for simple strings, the way the NGram viewer does, but to search by part of speech (e.g., you can search for hit the + NOUN). You can also get all the inflected forms of a word. For example, instead of searching separately for hit the fan, hitting the fan and hits the fan, you can just search for [hit] the fan. You can also discover collocates. For example, if you want to know what words typically come within two words after vicious, Bob's your uncle.

There's lots more fun to be had here if you explore. I think my afternoon just got all booked up.

Applied linguists just aren't serious about statistics

I'm not a statistician myself, and I've never published a quantitative study, so I'm not claiming any higher moral ground here, but it's sad to see just how lax our field is when it comes to statistical reporting. In the most recent issue of Language Learning, Plonsky and Gass consider 174 studies investigating the result of students interacting with others in the target language.

"Reliability estimates are one area that, although not perfect, have been reported very well (compared to other areas of SLA research; see Norris & Ortega, 2000; Plonsky, in press). Most other statistics have been reported either insufficiently or unevenly across the sample of studies. Although almost all of the studies reported using statistical tests (see Table 5), only 25% reported setting a pre- determined level of statistical significance, 2% reported the results of a power analysis, and only 3% (five studies, three by the same author, McDonough) reported checking the assumptions of their statistical tests. A somewhat larger portion of studies reported statistical significance as an exact p-value (44%) as opposed to greater or less than a particular p-value such as .05 (61%). However, these figures appear low, again, in light of the very high percentage of studies in the sample that employed statistical tests. Furthermore, reports in this area are not only inconsistent in the aggregate; 46 studies (26%) reported both exact and relative (i.e., < or > ) p-values. Means and standard deviations were presented in 64% and 52% of the studies, respectively. These figures are also somewhat low considering the frequency of studies employing mean-based statistical tests. Moreover, those data also indicate that 12% of the studies reporting means did so without reporting the standard deviations of those means. Along these same lines, we also see that the percentage of studies reporting t values and f values was only 26% and 32% (compared to 40% of studies reporting t tests and 39% reporting ANOVAs, ANCOVAs, and/or MAN[C]OVAs). Other statistics coded for were confidence intervals, reported in only five studies (3%), effect sizes (including d values and η² for mean differences, phi coefficients for χ², r² and Cramer’s V for correlations; 18%), and whether an effect size (Cohen’s d) could be calculated from data in the report (41%). Finally and perhaps most surprisingly, 5% of the studies in the sample did not report sample size."

The prevalence of first-person pronouns in books

There has been a good deal of discussion recently about C. Nathan DeWall et al., "Tuning in to psychological change: Linguistic markers of psychological traits and emotions over time in popular U.S. song lyrics", Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 3/21/2011. Mark Liberman (here) and Cosma Shalizi (here) have done a good job of explaining what's wrong with the paper and with the media's uptake.